Google’s smartwatch demo: still early days

Opinion: During endless keynote, a smartwatch only developers could love

Sundar Pichai touts the new smartwatch Wednesday at the Google I/O Developers Conference in San Francisco.

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch)—Google Inc.’s seemingly never-ending keynote that opened its developer conference Wednesday included demos of new smartwatches running Android Wear, Google’s software to run wearable devices, but the demo made it apparent Goggle is still in the very early days of wearable computing.

All the Google
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presenters appeared to be wearing a large black smartwatch, and when it was worn by one of the rare women developers on stage, it looked exceedingly large and ugly. During the demos, the large displays of the text on the face of the watch that appeared on the screen above the stage looked shaky and blurry. But the features included syncing the watch with your smartphone and displaying texts, emails and other notifications, based on your geographical location and scheduled events, such as an impending airplane reservation.

Google executives noted in their demonstrations that having a smartwatch synced with your phone would also let people stay better engaged with what they are doing or with each other. On average people check their Android phones about 125 times a day. You can talk into the watch or swipe it.

Developers cheered when they learned they would be getting a free smartwatch, either an LG Electronics G Watch or a Samsung Electronics Gear Live. For consumers, the LG G Watch and Samsung Gear Live, are available to order on Google’s Play store. The Moto 360 from Motorola will be available in the next few months.

The demo was just one of a number of software developer announcements, showing how Google plans to infiltrate even more aspects of our lives, from the car to your house to your body. The biggest entertainment came, not via an fantastic demo by Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who was missing from the keynote, but from two protesters who tried to interrupt the speakers on stage.

Still, the overall impression was that wearable computing may for now, appeal only to the early adopters, but Google, like Apple Inc.
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is laying the groundwork for a big battle.

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